Kids Mode

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Not from the Apes

by
Giuseppe Sermonti
on June 1, 1993

Originally published in Creation 15, no 3 (June 1993): 13.

Many schools proclaim as a matter without any doubt that man has derived from the African apes.

Many textbooks in primary schools in my country, Italy, have
on the cover page the illustration of an ape (usually a chimpanzee) gradually
rising from its bent posture, to assume the elegant figure of man.

This is a falsehood which any honest scientist should protest
against. It is not balanced teaching. That which science has never demonstrated
(and therefore which no serious scientist in the world would ever assert) should
be erased from any textbook and from our minds and remembered only as a joke
in bad taste.

One should also teach people how many hoaxes have been plotted
to support the theory of the simian (ape) origins of man.1 This began with
Java ‘man’ in 1891 which was nothing but a giant ape-like skull-cap
and a human leg-bone found 15 metres and one year apart.

It continued with the Piltdown skull in 1912, which was a combination
of an ape’s lower jaw with a modern human skull-cap (probably planned
and executed within the British Natural History museum), and the last was Peking
man in 1923, whose controversial interpretation was solved with the ‘disappearance’ of
10 skeletons in 1925 and the ‘loss’ of the whole collection of
fossils in transit to America in 1941.

Surely these events (among others) justify the sad statement
of Professor W. R. Thompson, FRS, that ‘The success of Darwinism was
accompanied by a decline in scientific integrity.’ Professor Thompson
also said, ‘A long-enduring and regrettable effect of the success of
the Origin was the addiction of biologists to unverifiable speculation’.